Again, most animals can raise themselves on their hind legs so as to survey the surrounding country, and they walk with their heads raised more or less in the air. These privileges snakes are supposed to have forfeited, yet some of them can stand several feet high, if they wish it, and they can even get over the ground—and that at considerable speed—with the head and front part of the body held thus high in the air. When a creature loses certain highly developed organs, which it once possessed, it is said to have degenerated—to have become a more lowly organised being—and the theory is that as its wants were lowly, it has gained by the change, for a complicated structure is only an encumbrance when it is not required. What good, for instance, would arms and legs be to a man, if he only cared for crawling through mud? He had much better lose them, and become like a worm. But if snakes have lost their limbs in accordance with these principles, on what principle is it that they can do as much or more without them, as other animals can with? For my part, I can’t help thinking that their wants, instead of diminishing, increased, and that, as their limbs didn’t improve, they used their bodies, and found they did better with them. The different people who had seen the sea-serpent on board the _Pauline_ went before a magistrate, and made a statement to that effect, which was taken down in writing. I have read it, and it agrees with all I have said, except that there is nothing in it about the cracking of the whale’s ribs. As, however, this is mentioned as having occurred, both in Chambers’s _Encyclopædia_ and elsewhere, I suppose it really did—that is to say, that the men who witnessed the combat, heard the loud noise like a cannon-shot as each rib broke, and talked about it afterwards, though they did not mention it before the magistrate. The sea-serpent, as well as other huge monsters of a less snake-like appearance, continued to be seen at tolerably frequent intervals after this, and the last time, I think, was only a year or two ago. Again it was a serpent, and off the coast of Norway, and it came so near, that the ship, which was not a large one, seemed endangered, and someone who was on it fired a shot, on which the monster sank.